The present invention is related to immortalized celllines. More particularly, the present invention is related to immortalized human bronchial epithelial and human mesothelial cell lines or cell lines derived therefrom.
Lung cancer is one of the more common forms of cancer and the cell type in which the majority of these cancers arise is the bronchial epithelial cells. Mesothelial cells are a less common, but important, site of origin of lung cancer. Both, normal human bronchial epithelial cells and normal human mesothelial cells could be cultured in vitro, but only for a limited period of time before cellular replication ceases. When transformed by transfection of the viral Harvey ras oncogene (Yoakum, et al., Science 227:1174, 1985), human bronchial epithelial cells replicate for longer periods of time, but these cells are tumorigenic, grow in serum-containing media as do carcinoma cell lines, and have been constructed to contain an oncogene closely related to oncogenes sometimes found in human carcinomas. Similarly, human bronchial carcinoma cell lines and mesothelioma cell lines are tumorigenic Clearly, such tumorigenic cell lines are undesirable, inter alia. for carcinogenic studies.